Acquia Coverage

Drupal, an open source content management system, now powers more than 1 million websites, according to figures released today. As of 15 February, 1,005,489 websites were powered by the CMS, according to the Drupal Association, a non-profit organisation that stewards the project.

(The figure was generated by an automated Drupal.org tool, and doesn't include sites running on versions earlier than 6.0.)

Some 12 per cent of the world's top 100,000 website have been built with Drupal, according to research by Builtwith Research cited by the Drupal Association.

It's heady stuff for an open source project born out of the desire of its creator, Dries Buytaert, to experiment with Web technologies.

"When I started Drupal, honestly I didn't have a master plan at all," Buytaert told Computerworld Australia in an interview last year.

"I started Drupal as a message board because I felt it was fun to build and we could actually use it in our student dorm. That kind of evolved into an experimental platform for me so I could experiment with different kinds of Web technologies from RSS feeds to blogging to other things.

"Eventually I moved my website from an internal, intranet kind of forum to the public Internet and that actually attracted an audience of people interested in the future of the Web."

Visitors to his site had a range of suggestions for modifications. "And so eventually I said, 'You know what — instead of me doing all the work how about I just give you the source code and then you can add these things yourself and feel free to send me back a patch'," Buytaert said.

"I kind of slapped the GPL licence on it, because that's what I knew from working on the Linux kernel, and I probably spent about 30 seconds thinking of a name — 'call it Drupal' — and uploaded a zipfile to my website for other to download...

"I had worked hard on it for a year and I was kind of proud of what I built, but I never expected a whole lot of people to adopt it."

Burlington, Mass.-based Acquia might hold its initial public offering as early as this year.

"We don't have a specific time frame other than to say we're certainly big enough to do it now," the firm's CEO Tom Erickson told the Boston Business Journal in a recent interview.

The company, which offers cloud hosting and tools for development software Drupal, released its 2013 growth numbers last week. In the last year, the company cited revenue growths of 50 percent, hitting its record revenue of $68 million. The company reaped around $45 million in revenue in 2012 – more than double that of 2011. Acquia's revenue has grown for 19 consecutive quarters.

It's no secret that there are far fewer women technologists working in the industry than men.
When it comes to computer-related jobs, men outnumber women at a rate of about 4 to 1.

And when it comes to the open-source software industry, women are even harder to find. A recent study found that 1 out 10 open-source programmers are women (about 10%), and that's up from 2007, when only 2 out of every 100 were women (about 2%).

The lack of women gives the tech industry, and particularly the open-source portion of it, a distinctly sexist feel.

Despite these sad statistics, it is absolutely possible for a woman in the field to go far and have a fabulous career. So we asked the Linux Foundation, the granddaddy of all open-source projects, to give us a list of stand-out women doing fabulous work.

Linux is an operating system software (a competitor to Microsoft Windows) that is quietly running the world. It is the foundation of the Android operating system. It's the software behind a lot of consumer tech, from televisions to washing machines. It is used in nearly every corporate data center and on most supercomputers. It powers everything from banks to nuclear submarines.

So, here's our list of women with awesome careers working on Linux, the tech that's quietly running the world...

Angie Byron, Director of Community Development at Acquia
Acquia is the commercial arm of Drupal, a free open-source content management system for websites. Drupal is another hugely popular open-source project and is often used on servers running Linux.

Byron has been a face in the open-source software world since 2011, when she was the first women to be featured on the cover of Linux Journal.

She's been involved with open source since the mid-'90s, she said, because she loves how it lets anyone "tinker with" software written by others.

"I’ve found that the community of folks I've encountered in Drupal, Linux and other open-source projects is also simply amazing: friendly, intelligent (but down to earth about it), hilarious, sincere, and endlessly passionate."

The same power of digital communication that is disrupting the commercial marketplace is empowering direct citizen participation in government. Whether enabling on-demand assistance, real-time information, or communications with legislators, much of what is empowering this new wave of citizen participation has its roots in open source.

In the last few years, governments across Canada have turned to flexible open source solutions. Open source software is freely distributed, and its open codebase provides an engine for innovation, as any developer can create improvements and share their work back with the larger community of users.

Municipalities like St. John and Ottawa are using the Drupal open source platform to provide government services online with greater speed and flexibility. Ottawa moved to Drupal in November 2012, introducing a responsive design that enables an optimal experience across mobile devices, tablets and desktops.

Use of Drupal has increased dramatically among provinces and federally, particularly in light of the Open Government Strategy, which encourages federal departments to adopt solutions that promote open information, open data and open government. Open source apps are enabling people to explore the wild, get updated train arrival times, access government research and publications, and bid on government contracts.

The agility that open source provides helps speed government digital initiatives to market. This provides a network effect that’s unmatched, and not limited to a department’s IT team or project budget. With open source, projects can be prototyped and tested inexpensively and quickly, which can help get a public sector site launched in a fraction of the time. In Drupal’s case, more than 30,000 developers have contributed code. That’s why open source can be a critical asset for capturing the opportunities that new technology presents.

Driving innovation
The crowd-sourced efforts of the contributor community are helping improve citizen services. The Web Experience Toolkit is an open source code library developed to help federal departments build websites that are accessible and optimized for mobile devices. Those using the toolkit are standards-compliant and aligned with Treasury Board of Canada Secretariat's Web Standards protocol, which helps them get ahead of the game as Canada.ca seeks to consolidate information and resources with a common, open framework. Health Canada and Statistics Canada recently implemented sites with the toolkit.

According to data compiled by Twitter and 87AM, the GRAMMY®s garnered 15.7 million mentions on Twitter during the broadcast, the peak moment of which was during the Kendrick Lamar and Imagine Dragons performance with 171,593 tweets per minute. According to Facebook data, 6.3 million people had more than 13.5 million Facebook interactions related to the 56th GRAMMYs, making it the No. 1 trending topic. Stats compiled by Union Metrics reveal that there were more than 100,000 GRAMMY-related posts created on Tumblr with more than 5.1 million reblogs and likes. Stats compiled by 87AM reveal that the top three most-talked about performances were, in order: Daft Punk, Beyoncé and Jay Z, and Lamar joined by Imagine Dragons. The most-talked about artists were: Lorde, Taylor Swift and Macklemore.

GRAMMY.com, the official GRAMMY website, saw visits on GRAMMY Sunday and the following day rise 15 percent from last year, with 4.6 million total unique users and 18.5 million page views for the site.** In partnership with CBS, The Recording Academy produced, for the fifth year, GRAMMY Live®,an official second-screen companion program featuring coverage from the GRAMMY red carpet, Pre-Telecast Ceremony and backstage. GRAMMY Live's livestream and on-demand viewing was up 100 percent over last year, generating nearly 5.5 million total streams.*** The official 56th GRAMMY live-blog, syndicated globally to 38 outlets, saw a 320 percent increase in user engagement minutes and a 659 percent increase in unique visitors compared to last year.****

On YouTube, the official GRAMMY channel saw a significant increase in views starting the week of Jan. 12 with more than 5.7 million views of GRAMMY original content leading up to Music's Biggest Night.** Views of content published immediately following the broadcast received 375,000 views in the first 12 hours alone.

"GRAMMY engagement continues to explode year over year as fans seek ever deeper ways to connect with Music's Biggest Night," said Evan Greene, Chief Marketing Officer for The Recording Academy. "These consistently increasing statistics underscore the overwhelming excitement and passion for the GRAMMYs, and music, across today's most meaningful social platforms."

Established in 1957, The Recording Academy is an organization of musicians, songwriters, producers, engineers and recording professionals that is dedicated to improving the cultural condition and quality of life for music and its makers. Internationally known for the GRAMMY Awards — the preeminent peer-recognized award for musical excellence and the most credible brand in music — The Recording Academy is responsible for groundbreaking professional development, cultural enrichment, advocacy, education and human services programs. The Academy continues to focus on its mission of recognizing musical excellence, advocating for the well-being of music makers and ensuring music remains an indelible part of our culture. For more information about The Academy, please visit www.grammy.com. For breaking news and exclusive content, follow @TheGRAMMYs on Twitter, like "The GRAMMYs" on Facebook, and join The GRAMMYs' social communities on Google +, Instagram, Pinterest, Tumblr, and YouTube.

Some time this year, a new version of open-source content management system Drupal is expected to be unleashed, Drupal 8.
The version is expected to be the most business-ready version of Drupal yet, according to Jeannie Finks, client advisory manager at Acquia.

The Burlington, Mass.-based firm provides cloud hosting and related services for companies that use Drupal for their websites. Acquia thus "aligns its business goals around the Drupal project," Finks said.
And so the firm — whose co-founder and CEO is Drupal creator Dries Buytaert — is putting resources behind the worldwide initiative to build the new version.

Those include sponsoring a "coding sprint" this weekend (January 26) for Drupal 8, to be held at Genuine Interactive in Boston (registration for the event has ended).

At the end of last week, Drupal creator and Acquia co-founder/CTO Dries Buytaert went on reddit and spent some time doing an "Ask Me Anything" session with a whole slew of interested redditors. It was significant for Buytaert because the Q & A fell on the thirteenth anniversary of the founding of Drupal.

It's interesting for us because it gives some insight into the life and career of one of the local tech leaders who is generally quiet and pretty private.

The session, "I'm Dries Buytaert, project lead of Drupal. Ask me anything", featured a ton of questions about Drupal, content management system, as well as Acquia. However, there were plenty of personal and pretty funny exchanges as well.

SAN FRANCISCO and SANTA MONICA, Calif. (January 22, 2014) — The Recording Academy® and CBS will launch GRAMMY Live®, bringing music fans around the globe unprecedented, multiplatform access to all the VIP and backstage events leading up to and throughout the 56th Annual GRAMMY Awards®. GRAMMY Live will begin Sunday, Jan. 26 at 9 a.m. PT/noon ET at GRAMMY.com, CBS.com and on the GRAMMY Live mobile apps for iOS and AndroidTM, and continue through the live telecast, which airs 8p.m. – 11:30p.m. ET/PT on the CBS Television Network.

GRAMMY Live will once again leverage Akamai's global distribution HD network for live streaming and video on demand to power extensive live and on-demand streaming. The Recording Academy has also partnered with the most progressive online companies and leveraged the best of both open-source and proprietary technologies to deliver a cohesive, exciting and more enriching user experience for GRAMMY.com and GRAMMY.org, including Acquia, Drupal, Lullabot, and Ooyala.

Losing weight and getting fit are among the top five most popular New Year’s Resolutions every year. But resolutions tend to wear out by spring and many people struggle to keep up the energy, enthusiasm and motivation to stick to their goals. A very 2014 solution may be the answer to this problem: data.

Although data may not seem as motivational as a good RATT mix or a 6-foot-3, ex-Navy SEAL trainer yelling in your ear, data could be your ticket to a happy, healthy new year. And technologists are all in. At CES this year, fitness wearables stole the show. From Fitbit to the new Sleep Number smart bed, these products are all about data; their value is that they collect troves of data about the wearer’s exercise, eating and sleeping habits, which they can then (hopefully) turn into actionable changes.

Data, Data, Data

For marketers, the data from these highly intelligent smart devices provides valuable information about consumer likes, dislikes, routines and habits that’s used for a slightly different purpose. This data ultimately provides strategic direction for marketing campaigns and promotions. Using this personalized information gathered from smart devices, marketers can set advertising campaigns based on the specific times of the year when people are more likely to gain weight, lose sleep, eat more salad, etc. Say, for example, that Planet Fitness gathers data from Fitbit and serves more ads to users of the fitness band between Thanksgiving and New Year's.

Contextual Relevance

But what if this information could do more than just determine when an advertisement runs or a promotion goes live? This brings me to the idea of the connected device and the Internet of Things.

Drupal, the popular open source content management system, officially turned 13 last week. To help celebrate the start of Drupal's awkward teenage years, Dries Buytaert, Drupal's creator and the founder/CTO of Acquia (which provides professional services around Drupal), took part in an Ask Me Anything session on Reddit. During the session, Buytaert shared some information on the development of the next major release, Drupal 8.

The biggest question, of course, is when will Drupal 8 be released. Drupal 7 was released three years ago, and folks are wondering when D8 is coming. Buytaert was non-committal ("No comment"), so no word just yet and when to expect it.

When asked about what he thought they had gotten right in Drupal 8, Buytaert said "modernizing the code base to use standard best practices". The biggest implication of this is moving to object oriented PHP which, as he wrote last year, should help make Drupal-based sites less complex and easier for non-Drupal experts to maintain.

On the flip side, when asked what he thought they've gotten wrong in D8 so far, Buytaert indicated that part of the reason for the extended development time has been poor management of technical debt.

There’s an exciting global event coming up where talented people from all over the world will come together and sprint.

I’m not talking about the Olympics. I’m talking about the Drupal 8 Global Sprint. And unlike the upcoming Winter Games in Sochi, Russia, this weekend’s Drupal hackathon still has room for you.

Drupal, of course, is a popular open-source content management system. It runs about 2 percent of the world’s websites — not a huge share but an enormous raw number.

More than a million contributors from 230 countries make Drupal work and, from time to time, a bunch of them get together to do a lot of work in a short amount of time. The Global Sprint is one of those times.

Sprint events are happening in 30 cities worldwide, and there’s one in Boston Saturday at Genuine Interactive. It’ll probably be the coolest because it’s sponsored by Acquia, whose chief technology officer, Dries Buytaert, created Drupal.

1. What significant changes did ‘Media & Entertainment’ segment witness in 2013? What did these changes mean to vendors and customers?

There was a wave of media industry consolidation in 2013. The most significant activity occurred in the local media ownership segment, where there was almost $7 billion in mergers and acquisitions among companies such as Sinclair Broadcasting, Gannett, and Tribune. These companies now face the challenge of standardizing their growing digital portfolios on to new platforms from their distinct and various legacy content management systems (CMSs). Such CMSs were designed for the specific needs of TV stations and do not address the complexity of what a consumer expects from a digital media experience that brings together social media, video and interactive content, mobile access, and more.

In 2013, we also saw the proliferation of new media brands. In cable, new channels launched -- including Fusion, El Rey, Pivot, and Revolt -- with a special focus on minority and millennial consumers. In order to grow and monetize the new audience for these networks, the brands must offer engaging digital media experiences, representing another opportunity for CMS vendors.

Finally, digitally focused media upstarts gained tremendous audiences in 2013. Upworthy, Vox, Gawker, and BuzzFeed developed socially oriented and viral content attracting huge audiences (55 million monthly uniques for Upworthy, 41 million monthly uniques for Vox, 97.5 million for Gawker and some 85 million for BuzzFeed). One of these new viral content types -- the “listicle,” an article presented as a top 10 list -- was pushed into the media landscape by Buzzfeed, while Upworthy’s key to success are videos that have social sharing integrations. Combined, the audience for these four sites have an audience northward of 250 million monthly unique visitors, while all U.S. newspaper websites pull in about 141 million online monthly uniques. The attention that these upstart sites attract has also drawn capital to these companies. Vice Media received a $70 million investment from News Corp, while Vox Media raised $34 million in investment dollars, and Buzzfeed raised an additional $19 million. These companies will use the capital to create new content offerings, which, in turn, will drive more digital development.

With all this in mind, it’s an exciting time for Acquia; there is tremendous opportunity to transform traditional media companies’ digital experiences as they consolidate, and enable the development of new media brands.

2.What are some of the changes you anticipated would happen in 2013 but did not happen?

While 2013 was the year of consolidation and new media offerings, new technologies did not seem to transform content delivery this past year.

The Bay Area Rapid Transit service launched website redesign in only five months while also battling a 20,000-visitor traffic spike. How did they do it?

It could have been a recipe perfect for disaster. Just five days after Northern California’s Bay Area Rapid Transit relaunched its new Web site, BART.gov, it was hit with its second largest traffic spike of 2013 — a daunting threat, considering the site was placed on an expedited four-month development timeline and was unveiled just as BART's two largest employee unions were embroiled in a pitched labor dispute.

Oddly, however, BART’s Web Services Manager Tim Moore remembers the day — at least from a Web standpoint — being fairly calm. Moore said records show that on Nov. 22, between 7 a.m. and 8 a.m., BART.gov handled more than 20,000 unique visitors due to a major service delay in transit operations. The number represented an impact to the site that was roughly 11 times greater than normal for the hour, a time that typically averages only 1,800 visitors.

This success, which Moore describes as a “trial by fire,” was a quiet celebration that day as the news media focused their attention on commuter delay updates and the ongoing union dispute. The website’s strong showing and the secret behind its speedy development strategy is noteworthy, not simply within the framework of organizational accolades, but also in the way of lessons learned — lessons that began on day one.

A Surprise Announcement
At the beginning of January 2013, Moore said BART received a startling notice from Adobe, the site’s content management system provider. BART’s Web team was told that by the end of 2013, Adobe Publish, the site’s former content management system, would be phased out entirely.

“That meant that we’d lose all of our Web site publishing capabilities, our editing capabilities and maintenance capabilities in less than a year,” Moore said. “So effectively, that’s when the stopwatch started.”

Technology adoption has become a competitive differentiator for CMOs who strive to out-innovate their competitors. There is so much opportunity for brands to strengthen consumer engagement through their digital channels. So, with 2014 upon us, it’s time to look at how websites and digital experiences will change in the year to come. What is the future of the branded website? How will technology change customers’ online shopping experience?
Here are my top marketing tech predictions for 2014.

1. CMOs Will Take Back Control
Over the core components of the digital customer experience that is. Many of these digital customer channels, like websites, mobile devices and social networks, were offloaded to IT in the past. But in 2014, CMOs will take back the control over this content to ensure the brand image is accurately portrayed on the customer facing end.

2. Evolve or Die
Ok, this might be a bit of an overused statement, but it does hold some truth. Stemming from taking back control from the IT teams, CMOs will put a greater value on agility and integration over single vendor solutions in 2014. In today’s digital age, CMOs must embrace the shift to digital or risk being phased out in favor of digital natives who understand how business and technology meet.

An entirely new job title —Chief Digital Officer — has emerged because marketing leaders, to date, have not fully embraced the disruptive nature of digital. CMOs who don't evolve will face the harsh reality of marketing in a world where digital experiences are customer experiences.

3. Content Meets Commerce
Recent data from Forrester Research shows that Web Content Management and e-commerce are the top two priorities for digital executives. Next year, I believe the lines between these two priorities will blur. Customers want the opportunity to review great content while shopping online, and visa versa.

A new version of Drupal has been released. This maintenance release, Drupal 7.25, includes bug fixes and small API/feature improvements only (no major new functionality).

There were no security fixes made in this release, likely because none were identified.

Here are the major changes made in this release:

Added an optional feature to the Statistics module to allow node views to be tracked by Ajax requests rather than during the server-side generation of the page. This allows the node counter to work on sites that use external page caches (string change and new administrative option: https://drupal.org/node/2164069).

At least a dozen Boston-area software and Web companies are poised to go public in 2014, taking advantage of a surging stock market where shares of major technology companies are climbing to new heights.

These won’t be wet-behind-the-ears startups, either. Last year’s IPO market featured many very young biotech companies, but the class of 2014 will probably include many seasoned tech companies, with established customer bases and profits, to boot.

Those getting ready for the public stage include some of the area’s fastest-growing and best-known Web companies, such as Wayfair LLC, a Boston-based seller of home goods, Care.com Inc., a Waltham company that has built a marketplace for dog walkers and home health care nurses, and Karmaloop Inc., an e-commerce company that sells urban streetware.

Lesser-known software companies also appear to be gearing up. There’s the software company Acquia Inc., which earlier this year hired the former top financial officer of Buddy Media Inc., a New York startup that fetched $736 million from Salesforce.com Inc. in 2012. And the cybersecurity firm Veracode Inc. brought on seasoned executive Ed Goldfinger, who helped take Zipcar public in 2011.

The rise of Drupal coincides with a movement that values thoughtful collaboration over aggressive competition. Contrary to tmany proprietary software companies and products, open source projects tend to become increasingly user-friendly and the communities around them actively work to welcome newcomers to the fold. The driven and radical altruism of many open source communities offered this new movement the authenticity they hungered for and one-upped the commercial competition’s biggest selling point—affordability.

It wasn't long before the usability, affordability, and ideology driving the popularity of open source began to pose a major threat to the commercial software industry. At first, the industry reacted with indifference, but one infamous case wherein Microsoft released a series of attack ads against the open source giant OpenOffice revealed that open source was becoming more popular than anticipated. When members of the industry realized, however, that open source wasn’t going away, the market began to adapt. Software giants began their own open source projects, some as an attempt to court open source users and others as a way to promote further interoperability between systems. Open source communities began to influence new projects and the foundation of a new economic model.

Over the last five years, e-learning platforms have gained popularity and notoriety for alleviating some of the strain caused by our education problems. Namely, for helping bring resources and materials to classrooms and countries that can't afford the proprietary and closed options.

For those looking to launch their own e-learning platform, the landscape has only recently been mature enough for almost anyone to jump in and start their own. In the early days, the way in which one would operate an e-learning platform was similar to document management as a means to knowledge management, rather than true e-learning. What I mean by that is, many people may use an e-learning platform as a Document Management System (DMS) to simply store their presentations and other documents. Others use it for storing rich HTML content (animations, dynamic slides, etc) and other educational materials, like quizzes and tests. To me, though, this is not what an e-learning platform is truly meant to do; it should offer a wide range of tools that:

publish knowledge

assess how the knowledge is assimilated by the learners

generate curiosity and collaboration among learners

teach concepts through constructive and playful interactions and self-experiences

There was a desire for a more active way to deliver content, for tools that could deliver things like a quiz, video conference, wiki, or forum. But very few of them succeeded in building a true e-learning platform.